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I’m very excited to teach my dream course in the spring—an honors seminar about the vampire in literature. Biting Back: The Subversive Vampire in Literature and Film will use the vampire as a springboard to discuss political, gender, and cultural tensions in a variety of books from the nineteenth-century onwards. Although I’m a British lit professor, the class is interdisciplinary, so I’m leaving several of the projects wide open. This means that if a student is interested in early forensic investigations, she might do a presentation on the influence of the Jack the Ripper investigations on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And, the best part—at the end of the class I’m taking students to London! Woot!

I feel like this current list highlights the touchstone Victorian vampire texts as well as current trends in popular vampire literature. Also, Auerbach provides a solid scholarly framework for class discussions.